Sunday, May 31, 2015

On the science of campus rape statistics

[Researcher Christopher Krebs] said that in the wake of the release of this sort of data, there tends to be a fair bit of overextrapolation — people want the numbers, already shocking, to mean even more than they do, and want them to signify something at the national level. Krebs knows this firsthand, having led the famous “one in five” surveys that were never intended to serve as national-level statistics — he and his colleagues only surveyed students on two campuses — and which nonetheless led to President Obama and Vice-President Biden stating that one in five women nationally will be sexually assaulted during their time on campus.